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Wild weather across US and Mexico a sign of El Niño's return

27 May 2015

Tornado’s aftermath

(Image: AP Photo)

WILD weather in Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and Alaska could be the first hints of the havoc that El Niño is likely to wreak this year.

A five-year drought in parts of Texas and Oklahoma has dramatically broken – with floods that have burst dams, washed away houses and taken at least five lives. In Texas the rains came suddenly over the weekend. “This is the biggest flood this area of Texas has ever seen,” state governor Greg Abbott said on Monday.

Just south of the border from there, a tornado killed at least 13 people in the Mexican city of Ciudad Acuna on Monday. In Alaska temperatures pushed above 30 °C in places, causing snowmelt and flooding.

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El Niño occurs when warm water wells up from the depths of the Pacific Ocean and spreads east. It warms the globe and drags rain away from parts of Asia and Australia, dumping it on much of the west coast of the Americas.

The weather we are seeing is consistent with El Niño, says Wenju Cai of the CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, in Melbourne. He says this event looks set to be an extreme one. Jeff Knight from the UK Met Office says it’s hard to pin all the wild weather on El Niño, but it is probably a factor.

Also in play is a weird blob of warm water that is warming the air off the US West Coast. And global warming isn’t helping, Knight says. “Global warming is a background tide that is rising, and we get all these features like El Niño on top of it,” he says.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Signs of El Niño chaos”